"A plain, rather sober man with a reticent, unyielding personality....But when a social principle was at stake, he was more clear-headed than most people, and he was quietly invincible....He was one of Broadway's most eminent citizens” - Brooks Atkinson
Elmer Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein at 127 East 90th Street in NYC. He later dropped the cumbersome “Reisenstien” for the more writerly “Rice” His grandfather, a German political activist, emmigrated to the United States where he became a businessman. He spent most of his retirement years living with the Rice family and developed a close relationship with his grandson Elmer, who became a politically motivated writer and shared his grandfather's liberal and pacifist politics. A staunch atheist, his grandfather may also have influenced Elmer in his feelings about religion, as he refused to attend Hebrew school or to have a bar mitzvah. In contrast, Rice's relationship with his father was very distant. As he wrote in his autobiography, his grandfather and his Uncle Will, both of whom boarded with the family, made up for the affection and attention his father withheld (26). A child of the tenements, Rice spent much of his youth reading, to his family's consternation, and later observed, "Nothing in my life has been more helpful than the simple act of joining the library” (42, 62).
Because of his need to support his family when his father's epilepsy worsened, Rice did not complete high school, and took a number of menial jobs. Rice prepared for the state examinations on his own, and after earning his diploma applied to law school. Though he disliked legal studies and spent a good deal of class time reading plays in class (because they could be finished within the span of a two-hour lecture, he said), Rice graduated from New York Law School in 1912 and began a short-lived legal career( 82). Leaving the profession in 1914, he was always to retain a cynical outlook about lawyers, but his two years in a law office provided him with material for several plays, most notably Counsellor-at-Law. (1931). Courtroom dramas became a Rice specialty.
Needing to make a living, he decided to try writing full-time. It was a wise decision. His first play, On Trial, a melodramatic murder mystery, was a great success and ran for 365 performances. George M. Cohan offered to buy the rights for $30,000, a proposition Rice declined largely because he did not believe Cohan could be serious. Co-authored with a friend, the play was purportedly the first American drama to employ the technique of reverse-chronology, telling the story from its conclusion to its starting-point. On Trial then went on tour throughout the United States with three separate companies and was produced in Argentina, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Norwar, Scotland, and South Africa. Rice ultimately earned $100,000 from his first work for the stage (98-119. Rice aptly entitled this chapter of his memoirs "The Jackpot"). None of his later plays earned him as much as On Trial. The play was adapted for the cinema three times, in 1917, 1928, and 1939.
Political and social issues occupied Rice's attention in this period as well. World War I and Woodrow Wilson's conservatism confirmed him in his criticism of the status quo. (He had been firmly converted to socialism in his teens, he said, by reading Shaw, H.G. Wells, Galsworthy, Gorky, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. (137).) He frequented Greenwich Village in the late 1910s and became friendly with many socially-conscious writers and activists, including the African-American poet James Weldon Johnson and the illustrator Art Young (158-160).
After writing four more plays of no special distinction, Rice startled audiences in 1923 with his next contribution to the theatre, the boldly expressionistic The Adding Machine, which he wrote in seventeen days (Durham 32-54). A satire about the growing regimentation of life in the machine age, the play tells the story the life, death and bizarre after-life of a dull book-keeper, Mr. Zero. When Mr. Zero, a mere cog in the corporate machine, discovers that he is to be replaced at work by an adding machine, he snaps and murders his boss. After his trial and execution, he enters the next life only to confront some of the same issues and, judged to be of minimal use in heaven, is sent back to Earth for recycling. Theatre critic Brooks Atkinson called it "the most original and brilliant play any American had written up to that time...the harshest and most illuminating play about modern society [Broadway has ever seen] (Atkinson 215). Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott were enthusiastic. Other reviewers spoke of him, hyperbolically, as a writer who might become America's Ibsen (Meade 123). Directed with great ingenuity by Philip Moeller, designed by Lee Simonson, and produced by the Theatre Guild, the play starred Dudley Digges and Edward G. Robinson, then at the start of his acting career (Atkinson 215). Ironically, it made its author no money at all. (Adapted as an innovatively staged musical in 2007, The Adding Machine enjoyed a successful Off-Broadway run in 2008.)
When Dorothy Parker was at work on her own play the following year (loosely based on fellow Algonquin Round Table member Robert Benchley, his marital problems, and the extra-marital temptations he was grappling with) and needed a co-author, she approached Elmer Rice, now acknowledged as the Broadway "boy wonder" of the moment. It was a smooth collaboration and also resulted in a brief affair between Parker and the already-married Rice, begun at Rice's insistent urging (Meade 124-125). The run of the play did not go smoothly, however; despite good reviews, Close Harmony (1924) closed quickly and was soon forgotten.
Rice was a prolific, even tireless writer. His plays over the next five years included the unproduced The Sidewalks of New York (1925), Is He Guilty? (1927) and The Gay White Way (1928) and two collaborations, Wake Up, Jonathan (1928) with Hatcher Hughes, a dramatist unknown today and Cock Robin (1929) with Philip Barry, a Broadway name equal to Rice's. None of these plays was a success. Rice was a theatre professional by this time: open to collaboration, increasingly interested in producing and directing his own plays. In the 1930s, he even bought a Broadway house, the famed Belasco Theatre.
Rice's second hit (after The Adding Machine) proved to be his most lasting literary accomplishment. Originally entitled Landscape with Figures, Street Scene (1929), won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums. "With fifty characters casually strolling through it," Brooks Atkinson wrote, "it looked like an improvisation....Based on the facade of a house at 25 West 65th Street, which Rice selected as typical, the tall massive setting caught the tone and humanity of a decaying brownstone” (Atkinson 275). The script had been rejected by most producers who read it, and director George Cukor abandoned it as un-stageable after the second day of rehearsals. Rice took over the direction himself and proved that it was highly stageworthy, if unconventional in its narrative style and disorienting naturalism. Like The Adding Machine, the play's break with the conventions of stage realism was part of its appeal (Durham 57-68).
Rice's plays of the 1930s included The Left Bank (1931), a comedy dramatizing an expatriate's superficial attempt to escape from American materialism in Paris, and Counsellor-at-Law (1931), a vigorous work that drew a realistic picture of the legal profession for which Rice had been trained. In that decade, he also wrote two novels and enjoyed a lucrative period in Hollywood, writing screenplays. His time in Hollywood was not without its friction, though, as he was looked upon by many studio heads as one of "those Eastern Reds” (McBride 237).
The Depression-inspired, anti-capitalist We, the People (1933) was a play particularly close to Rice's heart. It dealt with "the misfortunes of a typical skilled workman and his family, helplessly engulfed in the tide of national adversity," as its author described it. Rice engaged an activist-minded cast and noted set designer Aline Bernstein to design the fifteen different sets that the ambitious play called for. We, the People failed amid what Rice called "agitated" reviews (Rice, pp. 328-329). A 1932 trip to the Soviet Union and to Germany, where he heard Hitler and Goebbels speak, provided material for Rice's next plays. The Reichstag fire trial is an element in Judgement Day (1934), and conflicting American and Soviet ideologies forms the subject of the conversation-piece Between Two Worlds (1934).
After the failure of these plays, Rice returned to Broadway in 1937 to write and direct for the Playwrights' Producing Company, which he had helped to establish along with Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Robert E, Sherwood. Of his later plays, the most successful was the fantasy Dream Girl (1945) in which an over-imaginative girl encounters unexpected romance in reality. Rice's last play was Cue for Passion (1958), a modern psycho-analytical variation of the Hamlet theme in which Diana Wynyard played a Gertrude-like character. In his retirement, Rice was the author of a controversial book on American drama, The Living Theatre (1960), and of a richly detailed autobiography, Minority Report (1964).
Rice was one of the more politically outspoken dramatists of his time and took an active part in the American Civil Liberties Union, the Authors' League, the Dramatists' Guild and P.E.N. He was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the Project's "Living Newspaper" dramatization of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. An outspoken defender of free speech, he left that position with a "blast of scorn" at the Roosevelt administration's efforts to control artistic expression (Atkinson 274). In 1932, Rice had reluctantly supported the Communist Party candidate in the presidential election because he found Hoover and Roosevelt equally displeasing alternatives with an insufficient grasp of the crisis the country faced (Rice 326) He also spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s.
In the end, Elmer Rice did not believe he had been a success as a writer, not as he wished to define success (Rice 236). He needed to make a living and, while deriding the commercialism of the New York stage, he managed to earn a considerable amount of money, but at a cost to his more experimental vision. The realistic drama he could write with ease was at odds with the innovations that most intrigued him. The Adding Machine and Street Scene were anomalies and did not make money. An even more radical venture, The Sidewalks of New York of 1925, was an episodic play without words, "in which speech is indicated by gesture, by a series of situations in which there was no need for speech” (Rice 236) The Theatre Guild turned the script down flat; Broadway would never be ready for the level of experimentation that inspired Rice, a reality that was a source of continuous frustration for him.
Rice was married in 1915 to Hazel Levy and had two children with her, Margaret and Robert. After his divorce in 1942, he married actress Betty Field with whom he had three children, John, Judy and Paul, before their divorce in 1956.
Though born into a working-class family with no interest in the arts and known primarily for his attachment to theater and politics, Rice was also passionate about Old Master and modern art. His own art collection, slowly assembled over the years, included works by Picasso, Braque, Rouault, Leger, Derain, Klee, and Modigliani (267, 337). He regularly frequented New York's museums and in his autobiography wrote of his first trip to Spain and the powerful impact Velazquez had on him and, in Mexico, of enjoying the work of Diego Rivera and the Mexican Muralists, artists who shared his political bent (Rice 331-332)
Elmer Rice lived for many years on a wooded estate in Stamford, Connecticut, until his death in Southampton, England, in 1967 while on a trip with third wife, Barbara. Obituaries took note of a long and respected theater career. Brooks Atkinson described Rice in his history of Broadway as "a plain, rather sober man with a reticent, unyielding personality....But when a social principle was at stake, he was more clear-headed than most people, and he was quietly invincible....He was one of Broadway's most eminent citizens” (Atkinson 274-276).
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Rice#cite_note-2)
Because of his need to support his family when his father's epilepsy worsened, Rice did not complete high school, and took a number of menial jobs. Rice prepared for the state examinations on his own, and after earning his diploma applied to law school. Though he disliked legal studies and spent a good deal of class time reading plays in class (because they could be finished within the span of a two-hour lecture, he said), Rice graduated from New York Law School in 1912 and began a short-lived legal career( 82). Leaving the profession in 1914, he was always to retain a cynical outlook about lawyers, but his two years in a law office provided him with material for several plays, most notably Counsellor-at-Law. (1931). Courtroom dramas became a Rice specialty.
Needing to make a living, he decided to try writing full-time. It was a wise decision. His first play, On Trial, a melodramatic murder mystery, was a great success and ran for 365 performances. George M. Cohan offered to buy the rights for $30,000, a proposition Rice declined largely because he did not believe Cohan could be serious. Co-authored with a friend, the play was purportedly the first American drama to employ the technique of reverse-chronology, telling the story from its conclusion to its starting-point. On Trial then went on tour throughout the United States with three separate companies and was produced in Argentina, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Norwar, Scotland, and South Africa. Rice ultimately earned $100,000 from his first work for the stage (98-119. Rice aptly entitled this chapter of his memoirs "The Jackpot"). None of his later plays earned him as much as On Trial. The play was adapted for the cinema three times, in 1917, 1928, and 1939.
Political and social issues occupied Rice's attention in this period as well. World War I and Woodrow Wilson's conservatism confirmed him in his criticism of the status quo. (He had been firmly converted to socialism in his teens, he said, by reading Shaw, H.G. Wells, Galsworthy, Gorky, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. (137).) He frequented Greenwich Village in the late 1910s and became friendly with many socially-conscious writers and activists, including the African-American poet James Weldon Johnson and the illustrator Art Young (158-160).
After writing four more plays of no special distinction, Rice startled audiences in 1923 with his next contribution to the theatre, the boldly expressionistic The Adding Machine, which he wrote in seventeen days (Durham 32-54). A satire about the growing regimentation of life in the machine age, the play tells the story the life, death and bizarre after-life of a dull book-keeper, Mr. Zero. When Mr. Zero, a mere cog in the corporate machine, discovers that he is to be replaced at work by an adding machine, he snaps and murders his boss. After his trial and execution, he enters the next life only to confront some of the same issues and, judged to be of minimal use in heaven, is sent back to Earth for recycling. Theatre critic Brooks Atkinson called it "the most original and brilliant play any American had written up to that time...the harshest and most illuminating play about modern society [Broadway has ever seen] (Atkinson 215). Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott were enthusiastic. Other reviewers spoke of him, hyperbolically, as a writer who might become America's Ibsen (Meade 123). Directed with great ingenuity by Philip Moeller, designed by Lee Simonson, and produced by the Theatre Guild, the play starred Dudley Digges and Edward G. Robinson, then at the start of his acting career (Atkinson 215). Ironically, it made its author no money at all. (Adapted as an innovatively staged musical in 2007, The Adding Machine enjoyed a successful Off-Broadway run in 2008.)
When Dorothy Parker was at work on her own play the following year (loosely based on fellow Algonquin Round Table member Robert Benchley, his marital problems, and the extra-marital temptations he was grappling with) and needed a co-author, she approached Elmer Rice, now acknowledged as the Broadway "boy wonder" of the moment. It was a smooth collaboration and also resulted in a brief affair between Parker and the already-married Rice, begun at Rice's insistent urging (Meade 124-125). The run of the play did not go smoothly, however; despite good reviews, Close Harmony (1924) closed quickly and was soon forgotten.
Rice was a prolific, even tireless writer. His plays over the next five years included the unproduced The Sidewalks of New York (1925), Is He Guilty? (1927) and The Gay White Way (1928) and two collaborations, Wake Up, Jonathan (1928) with Hatcher Hughes, a dramatist unknown today and Cock Robin (1929) with Philip Barry, a Broadway name equal to Rice's. None of these plays was a success. Rice was a theatre professional by this time: open to collaboration, increasingly interested in producing and directing his own plays. In the 1930s, he even bought a Broadway house, the famed Belasco Theatre.
Rice's second hit (after The Adding Machine) proved to be his most lasting literary accomplishment. Originally entitled Landscape with Figures, Street Scene (1929), won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums. "With fifty characters casually strolling through it," Brooks Atkinson wrote, "it looked like an improvisation....Based on the facade of a house at 25 West 65th Street, which Rice selected as typical, the tall massive setting caught the tone and humanity of a decaying brownstone” (Atkinson 275). The script had been rejected by most producers who read it, and director George Cukor abandoned it as un-stageable after the second day of rehearsals. Rice took over the direction himself and proved that it was highly stageworthy, if unconventional in its narrative style and disorienting naturalism. Like The Adding Machine, the play's break with the conventions of stage realism was part of its appeal (Durham 57-68).
Rice's plays of the 1930s included The Left Bank (1931), a comedy dramatizing an expatriate's superficial attempt to escape from American materialism in Paris, and Counsellor-at-Law (1931), a vigorous work that drew a realistic picture of the legal profession for which Rice had been trained. In that decade, he also wrote two novels and enjoyed a lucrative period in Hollywood, writing screenplays. His time in Hollywood was not without its friction, though, as he was looked upon by many studio heads as one of "those Eastern Reds” (McBride 237).
The Depression-inspired, anti-capitalist We, the People (1933) was a play particularly close to Rice's heart. It dealt with "the misfortunes of a typical skilled workman and his family, helplessly engulfed in the tide of national adversity," as its author described it. Rice engaged an activist-minded cast and noted set designer Aline Bernstein to design the fifteen different sets that the ambitious play called for. We, the People failed amid what Rice called "agitated" reviews (Rice, pp. 328-329). A 1932 trip to the Soviet Union and to Germany, where he heard Hitler and Goebbels speak, provided material for Rice's next plays. The Reichstag fire trial is an element in Judgement Day (1934), and conflicting American and Soviet ideologies forms the subject of the conversation-piece Between Two Worlds (1934).
After the failure of these plays, Rice returned to Broadway in 1937 to write and direct for the Playwrights' Producing Company, which he had helped to establish along with Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Robert E, Sherwood. Of his later plays, the most successful was the fantasy Dream Girl (1945) in which an over-imaginative girl encounters unexpected romance in reality. Rice's last play was Cue for Passion (1958), a modern psycho-analytical variation of the Hamlet theme in which Diana Wynyard played a Gertrude-like character. In his retirement, Rice was the author of a controversial book on American drama, The Living Theatre (1960), and of a richly detailed autobiography, Minority Report (1964).
Rice was one of the more politically outspoken dramatists of his time and took an active part in the American Civil Liberties Union, the Authors' League, the Dramatists' Guild and P.E.N. He was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the Project's "Living Newspaper" dramatization of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. An outspoken defender of free speech, he left that position with a "blast of scorn" at the Roosevelt administration's efforts to control artistic expression (Atkinson 274). In 1932, Rice had reluctantly supported the Communist Party candidate in the presidential election because he found Hoover and Roosevelt equally displeasing alternatives with an insufficient grasp of the crisis the country faced (Rice 326) He also spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s.
In the end, Elmer Rice did not believe he had been a success as a writer, not as he wished to define success (Rice 236). He needed to make a living and, while deriding the commercialism of the New York stage, he managed to earn a considerable amount of money, but at a cost to his more experimental vision. The realistic drama he could write with ease was at odds with the innovations that most intrigued him. The Adding Machine and Street Scene were anomalies and did not make money. An even more radical venture, The Sidewalks of New York of 1925, was an episodic play without words, "in which speech is indicated by gesture, by a series of situations in which there was no need for speech” (Rice 236) The Theatre Guild turned the script down flat; Broadway would never be ready for the level of experimentation that inspired Rice, a reality that was a source of continuous frustration for him.
Rice was married in 1915 to Hazel Levy and had two children with her, Margaret and Robert. After his divorce in 1942, he married actress Betty Field with whom he had three children, John, Judy and Paul, before their divorce in 1956.
Though born into a working-class family with no interest in the arts and known primarily for his attachment to theater and politics, Rice was also passionate about Old Master and modern art. His own art collection, slowly assembled over the years, included works by Picasso, Braque, Rouault, Leger, Derain, Klee, and Modigliani (267, 337). He regularly frequented New York's museums and in his autobiography wrote of his first trip to Spain and the powerful impact Velazquez had on him and, in Mexico, of enjoying the work of Diego Rivera and the Mexican Muralists, artists who shared his political bent (Rice 331-332)
Elmer Rice lived for many years on a wooded estate in Stamford, Connecticut, until his death in Southampton, England, in 1967 while on a trip with third wife, Barbara. Obituaries took note of a long and respected theater career. Brooks Atkinson described Rice in his history of Broadway as "a plain, rather sober man with a reticent, unyielding personality....But when a social principle was at stake, he was more clear-headed than most people, and he was quietly invincible....He was one of Broadway's most eminent citizens” (Atkinson 274-276).
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Rice#cite_note-2)
Rice's Bibliography
PLAYS
On Trial, 191 The Adding Machine, 1923 The Passing of Chow-Chow (one act), 1925 Wake Up, Jonathan (with Hatcher Hughes), 1928 Close Harmony (with Dorothy Parker), 1929 Cock Robin (with Philip Barry), 1929 Street Scene, 1929 The Subway, 1929 See Naples and Die, 1930 The Left Bank, 1931 Counsellor-At-Law, 1931 The House in Blind Alley, 1932 We, The People, 1933 Three Plays Without Words (one act), 1934 The Home of the Free (one act), 1934 Judgement Day, 1934 Two Plays (Between Two Worlds & Not For Children), 1935 Black Sheep, 1938 American Landscape, 1939 Two on an Island, 1940 Flight to the West, 1941 A New Life, 1944 Dream Girl, 1946 Street Scene (opera, with Kurt Weill & Langston Hughes), 1947 The Grand Tour, 1952 The Winner, 1954 Cue for Passion, 1959 |
NONFICTION The Living Theatre, 1959 Minority Report: An Autobiography, 1963 NOVELS On Trial (novelization of play), 1915 A Voyage to Purilia, 1930 Imperial City, 1937 The Show Must Go On, 1949 PAMPHLETS The Supreme Freedom, 1949 Conformity in the Arts, 1953 |
Broadway Columnist Sidney Skolsky's 1932 Profile of Rice:
ELMER THE GREAT
THE 1929 Pulitzer prize play winner: ELMER L. RICE.
(Source: http://www.cladriteradio.com/archives/5246)
THE 1929 Pulitzer prize play winner: ELMER L. RICE.
- He was born September 28, 1892.
- The locale: Madison Avenue near 106th Street. Until he was twenty-six he lived within a radius of two miles of his birthplace.
- He has red hair. Shaves at least once a day. However, he has to be told to take a haircut.
- He likes to go for long walks, wander through museums and look out of windows.
- Graduated from public school. Went halfway through high school. He has no recollection of learning anything there of value to him. Later studied law. When he was admitted to the bar he quit the profession.
- He is married and has two children—Robert, aged twelve, and Margaret, aged nine.
- Hates to get up in the morning. His friends know enough never to disturb him before ten-thirty.
- When he finished writing Street Scene he was critically ill. His wife peddled the play, bringing it first to the Theatre Guild. They rejected it and so did John Golden, Jed Harris and Arthur Hopkins. The news that Street Scene had been rejected by these producers was kept from Rice until he recovered from his illness. An agent sold the play to William A. Brady.
- He has never been to a night club and never intends on going.
- Doesn’t care for the theater. He attends about three times a year and then sees musical comedies. Recently, because he has to cast two plays next season, he has been going to the theater three or four times a week. He has yet to see the third act of a play this year.
- His name was Elmer L. Reizenstein. The L is for Leopold.
- He owns some bum oil stocks.
- The first time he ever went to the theater was when he was eighteen years old. Three years later he wrote his first play. It was On Trial. Similar to Street Scene, it was rejected by almost every producer, and then was a big hit when finally produced by Arthur Hopkins. William A. Brady was one of the many who rejected it.
- Is especially fond of fat German pretzels and beer.
- Writes his plays in longhand. Then gives them to his secretary to type. He hates to rewrite and seldom does. It took him three months to write Street Scene.
- He is not interested in baseball, football or boxing. He never plays golf or bridge. Occasionally he goes to the race track, but he never bets.
- One of his great joys is reading poetry aloud to his kiddies.
- He is lazy. His motto is: “Never put off doing anything today what you can put off doing until the day after tomorrow.” Once he starts, he works intensely, often for ten hours at a stretch.
- The most tragic event in his life was when, at the age of eight, he proudly walked out of the house wearing his first derby hat only to have it and himself beaten up by the rough boys of the district.
- He doesn’t talk much.
- He lives in a hotel. He loathes home-cooked meals and always eats in restaurants.
- Some of the other plays he has written are The Home of the Free, For the Defense, The Iron Cross,Wake Up, Jonathan (written with Hatcher Hughes), It Is the Law (written with Hayden Talbot), The Adding Machine, Close Harmony (written with Dorothy Parker), The Mongrel, Cock Robin (written with Philip Barry) and The Subway.
- He has never voted.
- His pet hate is the movies. Believes that they have no future. He once worked in Hollywood for two years. He wrote Doubling for Romeo, the picture in which Will Rogers appeared.
- The set used in Street Scene is an exact copy of 25 West Sixty-fifth Street.
- He would rather live in Naples than any other place in the world.
- His lawyer when selling the movie rights to On Trial, twelve years ago, inserted a clause in the contract that the talking picture rights were to remain the property of the author. The movie magnate, who didn’t know what talking pictures were, readily agreed to this condition. Recently, Rice sold the talking picture rights to On Trial for a huge sum.
- His hobby is painting with water colors.
- When he wrote Cock Robin with Philip Barry, the collaboration was done entirely by mail. They exchanged drafts of the acts until both were suited. The authors never saw each other until the play was completed.
- He never puts sugar in his coffee.
- He learned that he had won the Pulitzer Prize a week before the official announcement. Of course there was much joy and excitement in the Rice household. Not wanting the news to get out, he pledged everyone to secrecy. However, he was a little afraid that his son, Robert, would boast about the prize to his schoolmates. He called Robert aside and warned him privately. Robert listened attentively and then replied, “Who wants to know, anyway?”
- He hates Broadway. He thinks it’s the cheapest place in the world
(Source: http://www.cladriteradio.com/archives/5246)
In His Own Words: Excerpts From Minority Report, An Autobiography
Rice on politics:
"I became an advocate of Socialism in my teens, and have been one ever since. By socialism I do not mean Marxism or Leninism, or any historical or economic dogma, but the development of a society in which the implements of production are employed primarily for the satisfaction of human needs, rather than for the enrichment and aggrandizement of a few individuals
…
The history of the rise of American industrialism in the nineteenth century reveals a cynical disregard for human rights and human welfare. It is indisputable that many of the largest fortunes and industrial enterprises were founded upon land grabbing, pre-emption of natural resources, illegal rebating, market rigging and stock jobbery, price fixing, bribery of legislators, judges and administrative officials, and, perhaps worst of all, ruthless exploitation of human beings
…
Competition must give way yo co-operation, the profit motive to a preoccupation with human welfare. Competition is inimical and destructive; money grubbing is debasing. It is false to say that the desire for gain is man's greatest incentive. The heights in art, science, statesmanship and learning have been attained by those who were not primarily interested in material advancement" (Minority Report, 462-464)
Rice on writing:
"I have never regretted my choice of a career. A writer, if he is not plagued by economic worries, is about as independent as anyone can be. Since I have never wanted to amass wealth or to live sumptuously, and have found my ware sufficiently marketable to enable me to pay my way, I have written not only pretty much what I pleased, but also when and where I pleased, for I have no taskmaster but myself, and I carry my workshop with me.
…
"I have wished for the dramaturgic skill of an Ibsen, the intellectual brilliance of a Shaw, the tragic power of an O'Neill, the poetic gift of a Synge, the insight of a Chekhov. But Ibsen led a bleak, lonely life, Shaw was childless, O'Neill was racked by illness and self-torture, Synge died in his thirties and Chekhov in his forties; I would not have wanted to change places with any of them. It is so with personal traits too. I have had many acquaintances who have been my superiors in knowledge, wisdom, wit, graciousness, generosity or tolerance; yet I have never wanted to be anyone but myself--perhaps because I am logical enough to see that I never could be anyone but myself" (Minority Report 470-471).
"I became an advocate of Socialism in my teens, and have been one ever since. By socialism I do not mean Marxism or Leninism, or any historical or economic dogma, but the development of a society in which the implements of production are employed primarily for the satisfaction of human needs, rather than for the enrichment and aggrandizement of a few individuals
…
The history of the rise of American industrialism in the nineteenth century reveals a cynical disregard for human rights and human welfare. It is indisputable that many of the largest fortunes and industrial enterprises were founded upon land grabbing, pre-emption of natural resources, illegal rebating, market rigging and stock jobbery, price fixing, bribery of legislators, judges and administrative officials, and, perhaps worst of all, ruthless exploitation of human beings
…
Competition must give way yo co-operation, the profit motive to a preoccupation with human welfare. Competition is inimical and destructive; money grubbing is debasing. It is false to say that the desire for gain is man's greatest incentive. The heights in art, science, statesmanship and learning have been attained by those who were not primarily interested in material advancement" (Minority Report, 462-464)
Rice on writing:
"I have never regretted my choice of a career. A writer, if he is not plagued by economic worries, is about as independent as anyone can be. Since I have never wanted to amass wealth or to live sumptuously, and have found my ware sufficiently marketable to enable me to pay my way, I have written not only pretty much what I pleased, but also when and where I pleased, for I have no taskmaster but myself, and I carry my workshop with me.
…
"I have wished for the dramaturgic skill of an Ibsen, the intellectual brilliance of a Shaw, the tragic power of an O'Neill, the poetic gift of a Synge, the insight of a Chekhov. But Ibsen led a bleak, lonely life, Shaw was childless, O'Neill was racked by illness and self-torture, Synge died in his thirties and Chekhov in his forties; I would not have wanted to change places with any of them. It is so with personal traits too. I have had many acquaintances who have been my superiors in knowledge, wisdom, wit, graciousness, generosity or tolerance; yet I have never wanted to be anyone but myself--perhaps because I am logical enough to see that I never could be anyone but myself" (Minority Report 470-471).
Elmer Rice's Decalogue:
It is better to live than to die;
to love than to hate;
to create than to destroy;
to be something than to do nothing;
to be truthful than to lie;
to question than to accept;
to be strong than to be weak;
to hope than to despair;
to venture than to fear;
to be free that to be bound.
(Minority Report, 168)
(Source: Rice, Elmer. Minority Report: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963)
It is better to live than to die;
to love than to hate;
to create than to destroy;
to be something than to do nothing;
to be truthful than to lie;
to question than to accept;
to be strong than to be weak;
to hope than to despair;
to venture than to fear;
to be free that to be bound.
(Minority Report, 168)
(Source: Rice, Elmer. Minority Report: An Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963)
The Making of Street Scene (1929)
Inspirations…
In his chapter on the genesis of Street Scene Rice writes that he was inspired by the landscapes of Claud Lorrain. Check out some of Lorrain's paintings HERE. Rice was most interested in how the figures in Lorraine's paintings interacted with the often bold and imposing architecture around which they were placed. In reference to Street Scene, Rice writes:
“I was excited by the concept of a large number of diverse individuals whose behavior and relationships were largely conditioned by their accidental common occupancy of a looming architectural pile. In keeping with this plastic approach, I thought of calling the play ‘Landscape with Figures.’ But that seemed a little too esoteric, so I borrowed another term from painting, ‘Street Scene.’”
Given this, it is interesting to think about how Lorrain's sense of scale influenced Rice's work and the story that would eventually become he 1947 opera Street Scene.
“I was excited by the concept of a large number of diverse individuals whose behavior and relationships were largely conditioned by their accidental common occupancy of a looming architectural pile. In keeping with this plastic approach, I thought of calling the play ‘Landscape with Figures.’ But that seemed a little too esoteric, so I borrowed another term from painting, ‘Street Scene.’”
Given this, it is interesting to think about how Lorrain's sense of scale influenced Rice's work and the story that would eventually become he 1947 opera Street Scene.
Rice was also inspired by the song "The Sidewalks of New York. Give it a listen below:
And here's a little backstory on the song: